America Aflame (26 page)

Under the heading of “A Religious Revolution,” Bennett described the revival in satiric terms as a movement of “merchants, bankers, politicians, financiers [making] oral confession that they have done those things which they ought not to have done, and left undone those things which they ought to have done.” Perhaps, he suggested, these devoted servants of God could repent their attempts “to drive the working class to church on their only day of rest,” in reference to the Sabbatarian laws evangelicals promoted to control the Sunday behavior of Irish and German immigrants. The
Herald
offered frequent tallies of those who attended revival meetings and those who patronized the city's theaters, with the latter attendance always more than twofold the former. As Bennett gleefully concluded, “It would seem that Satan still has the majority.”
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While Bennett poked fun, Greeley captured the essence of the revival as an exercise in self-discipline at a time when restraint and humility seemed in short supply. He congratulated the men on their high “moral tone … great sobriety, and a commendable freedom from undue excess.” Greeley's
Tribune
was filled with stories of miraculous conversions and of a nation transformed. But the participants looked much more to themselves than to the nation. The revival was notable for its apolitical aspect. In fact, posted notices outside the rooms and buildings where these lunchtime meetings occurred specifically forbade discussion of politics. Revivalists boasted of their nonpartisan and nonsectarian services. Politics had become so corrupt and divisive that it had defiled religion.
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There was also an absence of women, especially in prominent and visible roles. At some meetings about the city, men expressly barred women from attending, or asked them to remain silent during the service. When Maggie Van Cott, who would go on to become the first female Methodist minister, stood up and spoke about “the power of Christ to save,” several men informed her after the meeting that this was “strictly a men's meeting” and that there were “plenty of places elsewhere where women can speak.”
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The masculinization of evangelical Protestantism represented by the revival countered a decades-long trend of female church leadership. Despite the high profile of ministers such as Charles Grandison Finney and Henry Ward Beecher, middle-class urban women had played a significant role in spreading the gospel of evangelical Christianity from the 1830s onward. They wrote for church tracts and journals, and they emphasized the importance of the family in establishing a Christian community and nation, and the mother's fundamental role in that process. But for the young men who came to cities in the 1850s, this feminized, family-centered Christianity proved insufficient as a bulwark against the anomie of modern urban life. The YMCA played a major role in publicizing and promoting the revival of 1857–58, and reinforced the anti-clerical, ecumenical Protestant nature of the movement. “Y” members touted a more muscular Christianity, stressing physical fitness and equating probity in business affairs with “manliness.”

The economic crisis did not cause businessmen to reject the work ethic or question their faith. Commerce and religion mixed well and repeatedly at the lunchtime meetings. Evangelical Protestantism looked upon financial success as a correlate of spiritual worth. The Panic of 1857 was a not-so-gentle reminder that the urban commercial world had strayed from these connections. The revival was a means to resurrect the partnership between God and Mammon. As one participant noted, “We trust that since prayer has once entered the counting-room it will never leave it; and that the ledger,… the blotting-book, the pen and kin, will all be consecrated by a heavenly presence.” That Dwight L. Moody moved from selling shoes to saving souls as a full-time urban evangelist, and that John Wanamaker left his YMCA executive post for a successful retail career, reflected the mutual accessibility of business and religion. Both employed similar promotional techniques, and both emphasized a strong work ethic with the promise of ultimate rewards for faithful service.
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If the revival was, in part, a response to the unbridled individualism of the 1850s, it was also, ironically, limited by that same individualism. The indifference to community needs, particularly those of the poor, now so visible as a result of the economic collapse, and the plight of working men and women were major failures of the evangelical revival. This lent some credibility to the charges of hypocrisy cast by southern critics who saw northerners as a collection of self-absorbed, hedonistic, and shallow individuals, blind to the misery in their midst, and self-righteous toward everyone else.

The hope proved elusive that the revival would generate a nationwide ecumenical Protestant movement away from sectional divisiveness and toward the one God. A religious publication, the
New York Christian Observer
, rejoiced that the revival had created an “era of good feelings between Christians who had forgotten all past alienations and distractions.” But the emphasis on individual salvation did not dissolve the political sensibilities of the revivalists. To the contrary, it seemed to imbue even more the great political issues with moral import.
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As the spring of 1858 turned to summer, the economy slowly began to rebound, and the stream of men marching purposefully to lunchtime prayer meetings diminished to a trickle. The press turned to other phenomena. The men had prayed themselves and the economy back to health. The outpouring of religious sentiment, though fleeting, would leave a lasting impression, especially on the young men who had now found a soul in the city and a group of like-minded fellows as friends. The scripted prayer meetings fell away, but the spiritual rebirth did not. Religion provided not only solace but also explanations for a time beset by increasing uncertainty. The revival did not change society dramatically any more than it pushed the nation out of the economic doldrums. But now with each turn in the political arena many more people, not only the fervent evangelicals, came to understand that mere events could hold transcendent meaning.

Alexander Stephens merely wanted to transcend his foul mood. Leaving Washington disgusted, he traveled to his home state of Georgia. Loath to sweat through the usual stifling southern summer, he convinced his half-brother Linton to accompany him on a meandering journey across the Ohio Valley to Illinois. Now, Illinois was not, in those days, a prime destination for a summer vacation. The state boasted few natural springs or cool mountain retreats to attract well-heeled vacationers. But Stephens missed politics, even if he did not miss Washington. He came to Illinois to look up two of his friends, one his new fellow Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, and the other his old crony from Whig Party days, Abe Lincoln. Douglas and Lincoln were locked in a battle for the United States Senate. When a reporter asked Stephens to handicap the race, the Georgian said he hoped Douglas would win, adding that he thought President Buchanan's animus against the Illinois senator for his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution was “wickedly foolish.” Stephens's comments shocked his southern constituents, who had vigorously supported the Lecompton document. But now that he had set his mind on retirement, Stephens did not feel obliged to follow sectional orthodoxy; he could return to principle. Principle also prevented him from supporting his old friend Lincoln, for Stephens feared that the sectional nature of the Republican Party threatened the Union, a point that Douglas would echo repeatedly in the unfolding Senate campaign.
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Lincoln and Douglas had been adversaries in Illinois since the late 1830s. When Douglas learned that Lincoln would be his opponent for the Senate seat, he remarked to a reporter, “I shall have my hands full.” Illinois, like many of the other states carved from the old Northwest Ordinance, reflected the politics of the areas from which its settlers came, with the southern part of the state staunchly pro-southern and Democratic, and the northern part increasingly anti-slavery and Republican. Abolitionist sentiment existed in and around Chicago, but it was a decidedly minor political factor. Most Illinoisans believed in a White Republic, and if they harbored any abolitionist sentiment, they expected that upon emancipation the freed blacks would go someplace far away. Illinois Republicans were a diverse group, mixing anti-slavery politics, Whig economics, evangelical religion, and Know Nothing nativism. The state party's rallying cry in 1858—“The Two Despotisms—Catholicism and Slavery—Their Union and Identity”—reflected this amalgam. Setting out what they identified as the nation's two great threats to democracy, and with the recent evangelical Protestant revival fresh in people's minds, Illinois Republicans charged that their Democratic opponents were sinners twice over, a threat both to individual souls and the national polity.
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Abraham Lincoln did not quite fit the mold of a typical Republican, if there was such a thing. The new party was still a work in progress, and Lincoln considered himself an heir to Whig icon Henry Clay, a man willing to compromise on the issue of slavery for the sake of the Union and hostile to nativism. But over the years, and especially since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, Lincoln's speeches had assumed more of a messianic tone and more awareness of the nation's global destiny. He had good political sense, understanding what his fellow Americans were thinking and feeling, and then articulating those sentiments. When he gave his acceptance speech for the Illinois Republican senatorial nomination in June 1858, after Dred Scott and Lecompton, and just as the economic depression and the religious revival were winding down, he captured the reverent but troubled mood of his Illinois neighbors. The optimism of the 1840s and early 1850s had wavered in the political and economic crises. The utopian communities, the myriad reform movements, in fact all schemes, it seemed, to improve mankind had stalled by the late 1850s, including the once-promising democratic revolutions in Europe. These trends troubled Lincoln, normally an optimist when it came to his country and its institutions. Just as the religious revival represented a personal rebirth for its participants, perhaps the nation required a similar rededication for its salvation.

Lincoln took his text from Matthew 12:25: “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” He had visited this verse several times in the past as his conviction grew that America could not fulfill its mission nor preserve its precious and fragile institutions if the nation persisted half slave and half free. It must be one or the other. This was not a Union-loving compromiser talking; the mounting political crisis had convinced him that the battle must be joined, probably sooner rather than later. The speech implied that Lincoln opposed not only the extension of slavery but the institution itself; that he would promote or favor policies designed to prevent its extension and erode its presence where it already existed.
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Lincoln argued that support for the Republican Party (and therefore for himself) guaranteed a free nation; support for the Democrats and Douglas affirmed the nationalization of slavery, a process already begun with the Dred Scott decision and Douglas's complicitous role in voiding the Missouri Compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Though the prospect that Stephen A. Douglas was part of a Slave Power conspiracy was far-fetched—Douglas, after all, had a very public and politically damaging split with the administration—the allegations played well in a state determined to remain white. Just ten years earlier, 70 percent of Illinois voters favored a constitutional amendment to exclude African Americans from the state. Douglas, seizing on this sentiment, would emphasize that Lincoln was a dangerous radical, a lover of black people (often put in more inelegant language), and an advocate of the unnatural mingling of the races.
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Initially, Lincoln had difficulty getting his message across. Less well known than the popular Douglas, he followed the Little Giant around the state responding to his speeches. It was not an effective strategy, as it enabled Douglas to set the tone and agenda of the campaign. So Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates up and down the state. Douglas understood that such face-to-face contests would only give his opponent the recognition, publicity, and audience that he could not attract on his own. However, if Douglas declined, the electorate might take it as a sign of fear in the face of a manly challenge. Douglas agreed, though he set ground rules on venues and the order of speaking that favored him. In the seven debates that followed throughout Illinois in the late summer and early fall of 1858, some stark contrasts emerged. If each side had hoped to use the debates to clarify its views and distinguish itself from the other, the affairs were smashing successes. But they offered positions, not solutions, and in that, they highlighted the increasingly irreconcilable nature of the current political crisis and how much the spiritual had entered the public discourse.

Citizens came in their wagons, families with picnic baskets and children in tow, by canal boats, on horseback, and on foot, townspeople, farmers, merchants, laborers, and housewives, a cross-section of mid-nineteenth-century America, to make a day or maybe two days of it, doing a little shopping in town, greeting old friends and family, and enjoying the communal culinary concoctions and the liquid refreshments that always accompanied such events. Not quite a circus, more than a political event, not as lengthy or as earnest as a religious revival, and more elevating than a county fair sideshow, the debates included all of these elements and then some. They were entertainment, education, and spiritual enlightenment.

Not least, there were the visual and aural contrasts—the unlikely sonorous voice emanating from the small, impeccably attired Democrat, and the squeaky Kentucky drawl of the Republican, so tall that his breeches never seemed long enough, and so awkward that his arms flailed about as he spoke, as if he were trying to find the right swimming stroke instead of the correct phrase. Douglas traveled to the venues in a private train, while Lincoln arrived rumpled from squeezing into uncomfortable public conveyances. Carl Schurz, who witnessed some of the debates, and who was not a paragon of fashion himself, noted with some pain that Lincoln dressed in a “rusty black frock-coat with sleeves that should have been longer” and black trousers that “permitted a very full view of his large feet.” If Lincoln wanted to appear as a man of the people, he succeeded. Douglas, on the other hand, projected the aura of a statesman.
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